President Joe Biden said he will formally apologise on Friday for the country's role in forcing Indigenous children into boarding schools, where many were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused and nearly 1,000 died.
“I'm doing something I should have done a long time ago: To make a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years,” Biden said as he left the White House on Thursday for Arizona.
“I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, told The Associated Press. “It's a big deal to me. I'm sure it will be a big deal to all of Indian Country.”
Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system shortly after she became the first Native American to lead the Interior Department. It found that at least 18,000 children — some as young as four — were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them into white society while federal and state authorities sought to dispossess tribal nations of their land.
The investigation also documented nearly 1,000 deaths and 74 gravesites associated with the more than 500 schools.
No president has ever formally apologised for the forced removal of these children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — during the more than 150 years when the US government worked to decimate Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian peoples.
The Interior Department conducted listening sessions and gathered the testimony of survivors. One of the recommendations of the final report was an acknowledgement of and apology for the boarding school era. Haaland said she took that to Biden, who agreed that it was necessary.
The White House said Biden believes that “to usher in the next era of the Federal-Tribal relationships we need to fully acknowledge the harms of the past.”
“In making this apology, the President acknowledges that we as a people who love our country must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful. And we must learn from that history so that it is never repeated," its statement said.
The forced assimilation policy launched by Congress in 1819 as an effort to “civilise” Native Americans ended in 1978 after the passage of wide-ranging law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was primarily focused on giving tribes a say in who adopted their children.
Haaland will join Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president on Friday as he delivers his speech at the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix. It comes as the Harris campaign spends hundreds of millions of dollars on ads targeting Native American voters in battleground states including Arizona and North Carolina.
“It will be one of the high points of my entire life,” Haaland said.
It's unclear what, if any, action will follow the apology. The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands. Some tribes are still at odds with the U.S. Army, which has refused to follow federal law regulating the return of Native American remains when it comes to those still buried at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
“President Biden's apology is a profound moment for Native people across this country,” Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. Said in a statement to The Associated Press.
“Our children were made to live in a world that erased their identities, their culture and upended their spoken language,” Hoskin said in his statement. “Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools in which thousands of our Cherokee children attended. Still today, nearly every Cherokee Nation citizen somehow feels the impact.”
Friday's apology could lead to further progress for tribal nations still pushing for continued action from the federal government, because it's an acknowledgement of past wrongs left unrectified, something “known and buried,” said Melissa Nobles, chancellor of MIT and author of "The Politics of Official Apologies.
